


inglorious

by sunhei



Category: Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Gen, Growing Up, Hurt No Comfort, Internalised Misogyny, Loneliness, Post-Canon, Social Anxiety, gloria's mum is a piece of work, imposter syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28336953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunhei/pseuds/sunhei
Summary: Bede knows.What else would explain the hooded stares when no one else is looking? He knows what a fraud Galar’s new Champion is, this patchwork pup from way down yonder, and if she isn’t careful, if she isn’tbetter-than, he’s going to share it via global broadcast.
Relationships: Beet | Bede/Yuuri | Gloria
Comments: 9
Kudos: 44





	inglorious

**Author's Note:**

> I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.  
> —Sylvia Plath, "Tulips"
> 
>  _nolite te bastardes carborundorum_  
>  —Margaret Atwood, _The Handmaid's Tale_

Girls aren’t supposed to be Champion at age fifteen. They’re just _not._

The public hadn’t known what to do with her for the first few years. It’s a shame she couldn’t reach out to Iris from Unova, or even her childhood idol, Cynthia, from Sinnoh. It’s a shame that her own mother couldn’t protect her from the onslaught of bad-good attention.

Leon had cut every last tie with the League and herself after his loss. His diehard stans online (“Mate, do _not_ read those,” Raihan had laughed) had torn her to pieces, called foul on Rose and his beneficent late-stage capitalism, and then poked holes in her crooked teeth and teenage acne.

On Rufflet, the fans all say:

> _unpopular opinion time but our boi leon was GRAVELY INJURED during the 2020 season of the championship finals!!!,,, and the Galarian League needs to step up!!! a thread 1/20_

“You’re so,” one of her stylists says to her--the same one that had worked with Sonia and Melony previously. She gestures dismissively.

Gloria coughs into her sleeve and offers a tiny smile. No dice, though--all she gets is a vaguely pitying look, and then a tired shake of the head.

-

She wears lash extensions now. They make her tired, smudgy eyes pop on camera, and sometimes that’s all it takes to quiet some of the meaner fans online. 

“Think of them as a matter of public affairs,” Nessa tells her in a brief exchange at a changing room. Gloria tries to rationalise the pain and frivolity of making her eyes more dolly-like, but comes up short with ‘now I look passably cute and 100% apolitical.’ Of course, like everything else about being Champion, they are heavy and scratchy and burdensome to wear. She hates them. So does Bede.

Depending on who she faces in exhibition matches, the corresponding hot takes online are either glowing with praise or utterly excoriating. There is absolutely no in-between.

“Hop won’t return any of my calls,” Gloria laments to Marnie over the phone.

“...S’ probably for th’ best,” says Marnie quietly, sniffling outside in the cold. Gloria would mother-hen her back inside, but Marnie insists on clearing her head away from her brother’s more emotional songwriting.

Gloria’s stomach drops. “Why d’you say that?”

There’s silence, and then the familiar sound of boots scuffing over wet cement. “He’s not a very nice person righ’ now,” is all she offers.

-

It’s not hard to crunch numbers, apparently, but numbers have never been her thing. She leaves that to the scientists (Sonia, Hop), the rivals (Bede, _Raihan_ , rather unexpectedly), and the scholarly types she encounters in the halls of Macro Cosmos.

During weekly conference calls, the male scientists laugh indulgently at her contributions. The female ones cough into their hands.

“Maybe leave this to the, erm…” says Hop, rubbing his neck apologetically.

“Arseholes?” says Gloria. _Shite-for-brains techbros, scientists with thumb-sized dicks, women who’ve forsaken their gender to climb the dickhead ladder to dickhead Nirvana--_

Hop winces. “...experts, I was going to say.”

Bede arches a single eyebrow. Oleana, detached and wintry in the far-right corner of the room, massages her temple and sighs.

Abruptly Gloria wants Marnie. She wants the might and mettle of Spikemuth on her side. Leather and jasmine, black nail polish and pink sundresses. An unruly, vicious underdog one snarl away from biting.

The shift of power would be a formidable thing.

But no, Gloria, that’s not how these things work in the real world. There’s a reason why Spikemuth remains off the map.

 _No one sends us invites anymore,_ Marnie texts.

-

Bede knows.

What else would explain the hooded stares when no one else is looking? He knows what a fraud Galar’s new Champion is, this patchwork pup from way down yonder, and if she isn’t careful, if she isn’t _better-than_ , he’s going to share it via global broadcast.

Never mind that everyone in their current conference room could care less about what two teenagers think.

-

Championhood gives her hives. She’s never gotten used to the sycophantic flailing from fans and reporters alike. Something about wearing a crown brings the freaks and fake sympathizers out of their hidey holes.

Her own mum can’t look at her the same anymore.

“--not at all, not at all,” she says in cheery undertone as Gloria trips out of her boots by the entryway. Her mum doesn’t look over and wave as she trudges past, reporters’ camera-flash eyes still haunting her in afterimage. “We’d be happy to have you by for dinner,” she finishes, sickly sweet.

-

Of course the call presages Hop and co. coming over at half past six. They sneak past the vermin by the front gates, Hop’s mother balancing a casserole in its scratched-up ceramic pot, and Hop doing his best to recall which steps are the quieter ones. He needn’t worry much, of course; Gloria’s mum had them all redone, repaved, mere days after news of her daughter’s win.

Barbecues happen at their place, now.

“Jocelyn! And—oh, Hop! Lovely to see you,” calls her mother from the backyard. Her new boyfriend shoves his hands deep into his pockets and frowns down at the grill, which is par for the course, and likely all the social interaction they’re going to get out of him. Her mum couldn’t have picked a less sociable man to shack up with, but then, Gloria’s hardly one to judge. _The Applin never falls far from the tree, now does it,_ she can’t help but think as she spots a text notification from Bede.

“Hey,” says Hop awkwardly, waving with a strange little smile. Gloria slips her phone back into her pocket and smiles.

“H’lo,” she says, aware of how flat it sounds.

-

If Postwick’s become a tourist destination for producing not one, but _two_ Champions worth their weight in gold, it makes sense for the entire region to descend upon it, ravenous for its secrets. Money pours in from everywhere, and with it come the Committees, sunken-eyed architects and bloody project managers and people with far, far too much time and power on their hands. They’re going to make an amusement park out of it if no one tries to stop them.

No one tries to stop them.

“And why would they,” snorts Raihan over the phone. “You said it yourself, didn’t you? Home gets pushed up North every year, until all you can do is make your bed permanent inside Rose Stadium.”

Bede, whose home has always been a question of vagrancy and displacement, is much less kind about it.

 **Bede:** There’s nothing left for you there, at any rate.  
 **Bede:** Tell me I’m wrong, Gloria.  
 **Bede:** I dare you.

-

“We should trade,” Gloria says to Bede, plucking at the sleeve to his Gym Leader uniform. “I’ll lead the Fairy-type Gym, and you’ll… you’ll be Champion.”

Bede stares at her. An ugly retort is going to explode out of his mouth like a firecracker, but then he channels his inner grandmother and refrains, swallowing it, ingesting it like a particularly large gulp of tea.

“We should not,” says Bede, removing her hand from his shoulder.

-

By the time she’s eighteen, things start to make more sense.

She’s still Champion. They haven’t taken this from her yet. It does wonders for her social media presence; she has stans now, too. They love her. They make little plushies of her, they set her on top of bookshelves and café tables. They ask for her autograph on them. They want to know her size all over the place--they want to make pillows with her body on them (why), posters with her magazine summer shoots on them (why), and any number of other peculiar, invasive things.

Leon’s Battle Tower is by now a naturalized fixture along the Wyndon skyline. Gloria set foot in it once, battled her way through a round or seven, and promptly got locked out of any more battles.

“Why?” she’d asked the staff indignantly at the time.

They’d only smirked at her eighteen-year-old exasperation. “No reason, Champion Gloria. Just--”

“Just preserving the egos of everyone else here,” Bede interrupts, swapping in his collected BP for some items without looking at any of them.

-

When Bede loses against her just before the final round of the Battle Tower, he walks forward stiffly to shake her hand.

“Lunch?” she asks him.

The corner of his mouth twitches.

-

Hop heads off to university the year he turns eighteen. Gloria’s mum picks up on it through the usual SNS channels, anxiously sits on it for an hour or two, and then caves to call Gloria. She calls at exactly 5:00AM HCT, when Gloria’s preparing for an early interview in Hoenn. It’s going to feature a range of famous people she barely knows, in a _language_ she hardly knows, so she doesn’t sleep a wink the night before anyway.

“Hop got into _Crown_ ,” says her mum, voice pinched with jealousy and something older, something that sounds a lot more like wounded pride. Her slothlike boyfriend rolls over in the background, the two of them probably drowsy from wine and Pikaflix at three in the afternoon.

“Bully for him,” says Gloria groggily.

“Their family’s ecstatic. They plan on hosting a farewell party to send him off.”

“Have fun,” sighs Gloria, laughing a little, “and tell him I say congrats, mumsy.”

There’s a moment of silence where she assumes her mum had ended the call.

“I always knew you were too stupid for university,” she says. Then she hangs up.


End file.
